With less than two weeks until the NHL's third lockout under commissioner Gary Bettman, there are no negotiations scheduled for a new collective bargaining agreement. The main divide between management and labor is clear: NHL owners want more money, and while they are sure to get it, the players want to stop the cash grab short of their wallets.

The league’s proposals all have included such drastic reductions in the players’ share of hockey-related revenue as to necessitate givebacks from existing contracts, which is the one point where the NHLPA has no flexibility in its position—nor should it. If the union allows the owners to roll back salaries, either through straight reductions or by greatly increased escrow, it amounts to an open invitation for the league to use the same playbook in every future labor negotiation. Player salaries would go on a Sisyphean track, tumbling back every time a new CBA comes up for discussion.

The players’ main proposal is better in principle, with heightened revenue sharing to ensure that a rising tide of cash for the NHL lifts all 30 clubs’ boats. The problem is the poison pill, as far as owners are concerned, of snapping back to paying players 57 percent of HRR in the fourth year. That’s as much of a nonstarter for the NHL as rolling back salaries is for the NHLPA.

After a lot of posturing on both sides, the central point remains the same as it was thought to be before negotiations began—determining how to divvy up $3.3 billion (and growing) per year. The NHL’s leverage comes from $200 million of NBC television money that comes in regardless of the labor situation, as well as the pain players would suffer from missed paychecks.

That’s why the NHL has been able to take more of a hard-line stance than the NHLPA, and why Bettman is able to use the expiration of the current CBA as a negotiating tool. “Once we get past Sept. 15, the dynamic changes," the commissioner said on Friday after talks broke off. "It gets more difficult than easier.”

In other words, if the NHLPA doesn’t agree to a deal that the NHL finds acceptable, and there is a lockout, they’re going to be giving back money when everything is finally resolved. Ultimately, it’s the decision of NHL owners whether to have top-flight professional hockey in North America, and unless the owners are fat and happy, have fun getting in your Honda, kicking up the tunes on SiriusXM Radio, and rolling on Bridgestone tires—all NHL sponsors—on the way to the nearest AHL game.

Sponsorship and TV rights dollars have skyrocketed, and NHL owners want to make sure that they, not the players, reap the rewards of their shrewd business dealings. The NHLPA’s aggressive revenue-sharing plan was an attempt to pit the owners against each other, but it only takes a coalition of 11 owners to prevent a new CBA from being ratified by a two-thirds vote.

The philosophy at play for the hardest-line owners, the ones who have everything to gain and little to lose from their position, is exemplified by Ed Snider, the chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, which owns the Philadelphia Flyers and is a subsidiary of Comcast, the parent company of, you guessed it, NBC. Similarly, north of the border, the Toronto Maple Leafs are owned by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, whose majority stakeholders are Rogers Communications and Bell Canada, the largest cable companies in Canada and parent companies of Sportsnet and TSN.

Neither Snider nor any owner is about to talk about their thinking on the CBA, not with a $1 million fine on the board for breaking the league’s omerta. Instead, there is this quote from Snider, from an interview last year that Laura Goldman of Philadelphia's Metro newspaper posted on her blog, and which was excerpted on philly.com:

“Capitalists build up business so that they can give weaker members of society jobs.”

Snider is a first-rate capitalist, and has built up the Flyers’ business, to the point where Philadelphia was able to comfortably give out around $70 million in contracts this summer, not to mention the failed $110 million bid to pry Shea Weber from the Nashville Predators. His quote was not actually hockey-related, as Snider was talking about the release of "Atlas Shrugged: Part I" last April, a movie for which he was listed as an executive producer.

"Atlas Shrugged: Part II" hits theaters on Oct. 12, which also is when the Los Angeles Kings are scheduled to raise their first Stanley Cup banner.

If Staples Center is empty that night, the NHL will have to hope that when hockey does return, it’s not the fans who shrug.